Volume 3, Issue 1 -

The word native is a key term in nineteenth-century British colonial administrative vocabulary. The question is how it comes to be central to the classification of indigenous subjects in Britain’s southern African possessions in the early twentieth century, and how the word is appropriated by colonial citizens to designate the race of indigenous subjects. To answer the question, I construct a semasiological history of native as a word that has to do with the identification of a person with a place by birth, by residence or by citizenship. I track the manner in which speakers invest old words with new meanings in specific settings and differentiate among them in different domains. In the case of native , a signal keyword is recruited to do particular work in several contemporaneous discourses which take different ideological directions as the nature of the involvement of their speakers changes. The result is a particularly complicated word history, and one which offers a clue to the ways in which colonial rhetoric is domesticated in specific settings at the very same time as the colonising power eschews it in the process of divesting itself of its colonies.

In this paper, I argue that the koine formation process is better understood when placed in a national context of language norms and use. Researchers often state that in cases of koine formation, where a koine forms within the same speech community from which the speakers originate – for instance within the same nation – the process will be influenced by that same speech community. Yet, most research on koine formation focusses on the local level, such as the levelling between the language variants of the incomers or the negotiations of power between social classes in the new town. The empirical data presented in this paper, collected in the Norwegian industrial town of Sauda, show that the historical context of language norms and use on the national level has influenced the process on the local level. This influence can be demonstrated by the variants that go into the so-called mix , as well as by the direction on the formation and the outcome of the focussing process. The mechanistic view that the majority variant always wins does not fit the facts presented here. I also hypothesise that since the koine formation process stretches out in time, the context of language norms and use may change during that period, and this sociocultural change may cause the formation process to change direction.

The Rhenish Mission Society, a German Protestant mission, was active in a small part of northern New Guinea, the Astrolabe Bay, between 1887 and 1932. Up until 1914, this region was under German colonial rule. The German dominance was also reflected in rules on language use in official contexts such as schools and administration. Missionaries were strongly affected by such rules as their most important tool in mission work was language. In addition, they were also responsible for school education as most schools in the German colonial areas in the Pacific were mission-run. Thus, mission societies had to make decisions about what languages to use, considering their own needs, their ideological convictions, and the colonial government’s requirements. These considerations were framed by the complex setting of New Guinea’s language wealth where several hundred languages were, and still are, spoken. This paper investigates a small set of original documents from the Rhenish Mission Society to trace what steps were taken and what considerations played a major role in the process of agreeing on a suitable means of communication with the people the missionaries wanted to reach, thereby touching upon topics such as language attitudes, language policies and politics, practical considerations of language learning and language spread, and colonial actions impacting local language ecologies.

In light of the question how the eighteenth-century English grammar writing tradition contributed to the development of Standard English, this article attempts to answer the question to what extent the grammarian James Buchanan made use of Anne Fisher’s grammar in writing his own. While Buchanan admitted that he consulted the works of other grammarians, he did not reveal which he used. It is argued that Buchanan drew on Fisher’s grammar for his focus on English concord, and for the inclusion of example sentences of false syntax and of exercises on bad English. However, the differences in layout and the subjects discussed in the example sentences and exercises are such that the similarities can be said to fall within the remit of acceptable eighteenth-century authorship and that they do not seem evidence of an attempt to plagiarise. On the contrary, Buchanan’s reliance on Fisher’s grammar can best be understood as a concern with the didactics of English grammar rather than with the actual language norms purported by Fisher – though some features seem inspired by her. As such, Buchanan’s use of Fisher’s grammar can be seen as an attempt to further the development of an English grammar teaching method within the discourse community of the eighteenth-century grammarians.